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2 Things Huawei Perfected Before Apple And Samsung

Check mate.

The mobile phone industry has been somewhat monopolised by two companies, with a majority of today’s population choosing only between Apple and Samsung. It’s a combination of clever marketing, product placements, and actually decent phones with decent features that has everyone convinced that the best phones come from either of the two manufacturers, with everything else from everyone else trailing far behind.

Well, Huawei Technologies has launched its latest flagship model—Huawei Mate 8—to disprove that perception. According to Managing Director of Huawei Device Singapore, Cheng Jiangfei, the phone was designed and built with the new generation of business individuals and entrepreneurs in mind, and is “the ideal phone to power face-paced, high-octane lifestyles of Singaporean professionals”.

If we didn’t know any better, we’d say Huawei designed and built the Mate 8 with iPhone and Samsung users’ complaints in mind. Never mind its 6-inch Full HD panel, aluminium unibody with a sandblasted back, 8MP front and 16MP back camera with image stabilising and phase detection auto focusing capabilities (these are nothing short of what consumers have come to expect of any ultra-premium flagship phone model), Huawei has chosen to dedicate its efforts to perfecting two basic, albeit slightly forgotten aspects of the mobile phone user experience that have been amiss since the dawn of the smart phone era.

Did it work? Well based on our experience with it, it most certainly did.

1 | High Performance Processor

The Huawei Mate 8 is powered by the Kirin 950 chipset, made by HiSilicon, a Huawei subsidiary. It is said to be the best processor chipset currently available; a benchmark for chipset-makers such as Qualcomm and Samsung to match. After two weeks of putting that claim to the test, we have yet to find a way to actually slow it down. Even though it comes with 4GB RAM (more or less an industry standard for flagship models), the Mate 8 just seems to have loads more bandwidth to handle any situation. Want to switch between your camera, photo editing apps and social media accounts or run multiple graphic-intensive games at the same time, the Mate 8 allows seamless multitasking with little to no lag whatsoever.

2 | Battery Life

The smarter a smart phone gets, the more power it consumes. It’s got to a point where we have trouble making a phone last the entire day on a single charge. Phone manufacturers try to solve this by making larger phones to accommodate larger batteries. But as we’ve all found out, larger batteries don’t necessarily mean larger capacities. The Huawei Mate 8 offers a 4000mAh non-removable battery that supports fast charging that, when paired with the phone’s own optimisations in its Kirin 950 chipset, gives you two days’ worth of battery life when on Smart mode (normal mode for day-to-day usage). The Mate 8’s rapid charging feature also gives you a full day’s usage after a 30-minute charge.